“Our Fragile Democracy: Historic and Present-Day Attacks on Our Civil Rights and Civil Liberties” will be presented on Saturday, Feb. 24, from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Japanese American National Museum, 100 N. Central Ave. (at First Street) in Little Tokyo.

On Aug. 10, 2023, California Attorney General Rob Bonta issued a historic statement and apology acknowledging the complicity of the California Attorney General’s Office in the incarceration and dispossession of Japanese Americans during World War II. This community education event will feature a fireside chat with Bonta and JANM President and CEO Ann Burroughs, a keynote introduction by Don Tamaki, and a panel discussion with key community leaders and scholars.

Light refreshments to follow the program.

Presented by JACL National, JANM, Florin JACL-Sacramento Valley, and Cal-APABA (Asian Pacific American Bar Association).

Free but tickets required for both in-person and virtual participation. Go to: https://www.janm.org/events/2024-02-24/our-fragile-democracy-historic-and-present-day-attacks-our-civil-rights-and-civil  

Emcee Amy Watanabeis the managing director, client services at Nakatomi PR. She has worked with local and national nonprofit organizations from California to Washington, D.C., with a focus on advocacy, grassroots organizing, and developing the political pipeline and leadership for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Through her community leadership and professional career, she continues to advocate for increased diversity and representation, especially for people of color, AAPIs and women.

She is associate producer for the Mineta Legacy Project, a documentary and educational curriculum profiling the life and career of Secretary Norman Y. Mineta, and is actively involved in the Little Tokyo community. She previously served on various community boards, including Kizuna, National Japanese American Memorial Foundation, Venice-West Los Angeles JACL Chapter, and U.S.-Japan Council’s Emerging Leaders Program. She is on the Steering Committee for the Los Angeles Consulate General of Japan’s Japanese American Next Generation Leaders Initiative.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Watanabe received her bachelor’s degree in communication studies and a minor in Asian American studies from UCLA.

Keynote introduction speaker Don Tamakiis a senior counsel at Minami Tamaki LLP, having received his B.A. and J.D. from Berkeley. He is the recipient of the American Bar Association Spirit of Excellence Award (2020), the National Asian Pacific Bar Association Trailblazer Award (2003), and the State Bar of California Loren Miller Award (1987).

In the 1980s, he was a member of the pro bono legal team that reopened the landmark 1944 Supreme Court case of Fred Korematsu, overturning Korematsu’s criminal conviction for defying the incarceration of almost 120,000 Japanese Americans. Tamaki co-founded the Asian Law Alliance in San Jose, and has served as the executive director of the Asian Law Caucus in San Francisco. He also co-founded Stop Repeating History, to educate the public on the dangers of unchecked presidential power, drawing parallels between the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and the Trump Administration’s policies targeting minority groups based on race or religion.

In 2021, Tamaki was appointed by Gov. Gavin Newsom to serve on the nine-member California Reparations Task Force to study the cumulative historic and present-day impact of 246 years of enslavement, 90 years of Jim Crow oppression, and 60 years of segregation and its vestiges, and to recommend to the Legislature what California should do to address these harms.

Panel moderator Susan H. Kameiis adjunct professor (teaching) of history and affiliated faculty, USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture, University of Southern California. The author of “When Can We Go Back to America? Voices of Japanese American Incarceration During World War II” (Simon & Schuster, 2021), she is recognized as a leading scholar and educator on our country’s unjustified wartime imprisonment of more than 125,000 persons of Japanese ancestry, solely on the basis of their race.

A descendant of incarcerees, she was a volunteer attorney in the legislative campaign that resulted in the successful passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. She draws upon personal, family, and community stories to convey the continuing constitutional relevance of this tragic episode in our history to contemporary issues of racial identity, immigration, and citizenship, and today’s threat to civil liberties. She is a graduate of UC Irvine and Georgetown Law.

Panelists

Damon M. Brownis special assistant attorney general at the California Department of Justice, serving as the senior legal and policy advisor on civil rights and racial justice matters to Bonta. In this role, he assists in the development and execution of the attorney general’s policy initiatives; manages legal strategy and policy; collaborates with senior management in the Civil Rights Enforcement and Police Practices sections and Division of Law Enforcement; and represents the attorney general as a liaison to state and federal agencies, associations, and advocacy groups.

Immediately preceding this appointment to Bonta’s executive leadership team in October 2021, Damon was the elected city attorney for the City of Compton and practiced law at private law firms for more than 15 years. He is a graduate of the Vanderbilt University Law School, and UC Berkeley, where he earned degrees in African American studies and political science.

Professor Gabriel “Jack” Chinis Edward L. Barrett Jr. Chair and Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at UC Davis School of Law. Regularly appearing on lists of the most cited legal scholars, he writes about criminal procedure, immigration, and APA legal history. His legal work with students includes persuading Kansas, New Mexico, and Wyoming to repeal anti-Asian alien land laws that were still on the books; the Ohio Legislature to ratify the 14th Amendment in 2003; and the California Supreme Court to posthumously admit an Asian American attorney to the bar after he was excluded because of his race (In re Chang, 334 P.3d 288 (Cal. 2015)).

His Cornell Law Reviewarticle “Effective Assistance of Counsel and the Consequences of Guilty Pleas,” co-authored with a student, was cited in Padilla v.Kentucky, 130 S. Ct. 1473 (2010), and Chaidez v. United States, 133 S. Ct. 1103 (2013). Justice Sonia Sotomayor cited his University of Pennsylvania Law Reviewarticle “The New Civil Death” in her dissent in Utah v. Streiff, 136 S. Ct. 2056 (2016).

A graduate of Wesleyan and the Michigan and Yale law schools, before entering teaching he clerked for U.S. District Judge Richard P. Matsch in Denver and practiced with the Legal Aid Society of New York and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom in Boston.

Lisa Doi(she/her) is the project manager of the new core exhibit at the Japanese American National Museum. In addition, she is a Ph.D. candidate in American studies at Indiana University. Her dissertation project is an ethnographic engagement with Japanese American pilgrimages to World War II incarceration sites.

As a volunteer, she is the president of the Japanese American Citizens League Chicago, where she has focused on growing youth programs, and a co-chair of Tsuru for Solidarity, where she has worked on campaigns focused on abolition and reparations.

Clay Zhuis a first-generation immigrant and an American attorney with more than 20 years’ experience in private practice and the nonprofit sector. He is the managing partner of the Silicon Valley Branch of DeHeng Law Offices with a focus on commercial litigation and cross-border transactions. He spends significant time on pro bono cases for Asian Americans.

For example, in 2020, Zhu organized and served as co-lead counsel of a successful lawsuit that challenged and overturned President Trump’s executive order banning the use of WeChat, a popular social media app among Chinese Americans. In 2021, he co-founded a nonprofit called the Chinese American Legal Defense Alliance with a mission of using litigation to fight against discrimination against Chinese Americans. His organization so far has started three separate public-interest lawsuits against the federal government for the infamous “China Initiative.”

Zhu is also the organizer and a co-lead counsel, along with ACLU, of a current lawsuit against the Florida state government for its alien land law that was passed last year. Among many of his recognitions, he received the award of “California Lawyer of the Year in Civil Rights” from the Daily Journalin 2022.

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